Prof. Dr. Heike Behrens

Heike Behrens is a full professor of "Cognitive Linguistics and Language Acquisition Research" with a joint affiliation in the German and English department. She specializes in first language acquisition where she takes a cognitive-developmental perspective and works with large databases. Heike Behrens did her Staatsexamen and MA in English and German at the University of Kiel, and her PhD at the University of Amsterdam. She held research positions at the Universities of Braunschweig and Cologne, and the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, and spent a year as a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. Before coming to Basel in 2005, she was professor of German Linguistics at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.